Interview: Vessels

Sometimes bands transcend the musical boundaries in which they inhabit and end up sounding more like a soundtrack to an epic news piece. If an asteroid was to hit the earth in tin minutes time I can almost guarantee the BBC would use a Vessels song to accompany the mayhem and thats what makes the band so enjoyable to listen to.
We had the pleasure of sending some questions to guitarist Tom Evans and this is what went down!
Hello! How are you?
Spokey Dokey, thankyou very muc... (continued)

Sometimes bands transcend the musical boundaries in which they inhabit and end up sounding more like a soundtrack to an epic news piece. If an asteroid was to hit the earth in tin minutes time I can almost guarantee the BBC would use a Vessels song to accompany the mayhem and thats what makes the band so enjoyable to listen to.
We had the pleasure of sending some questions to guitarist Tom Evans and this is what went down!
Hello! How are you?
Spokey Dokey, thankyou very much. Enjoying the onset of spring.
Firstly, could you introduce yourself to our readers?
My name's Tom and I play guitar and sing quietly and out of tune.
You're about to embark on tour, are you excited? Do you have any good stories for us from previous tours?
I'd be more excited if we'd have finished any of the 10 new songs that we've started, but yeah, I guess I am a bit. It will be the first time we've ever been abroad to play, bar recording the album in Minneapolis. A funny story from a previous tour is when Martin locked the keys in the van, and we ended the show with the immortal words "Thankyou, we've been Vessels. Does anyone have a junior hacksaw?"
What was it like recording your album with John Congleton? Was it scary?
Not at all. He's a really safe guy, and created a very nice, relaxed-but-focused working environment for us. The beautiful snow-covered scenery gave the whole process quite a surreal edge, in retrospect. It was so cold my hair froze to my head when I went outside after having a shower! The only scary bit was when the plane from Gatwick got delayed and then cancelled, and we were at the back of a huge queue of irate passengers when we should have been in Pachyderm setting up our equipment. Fortunately Martin blagged us onto the next flight by threatening to charge the wasted studio costs to the Airline.
Which do you prefer the recording process or playing live?
We tracked most of our album live, so they're not that different, apart from one has a bigger audience and the other is more stressful when you fuck up. I think I enjoy playing live more, but I'd prefer to be making albums, if that makes sense.
You often use live electronic drums in your sets, how easy/hard is this to do well? Is there an element of unpredictability?
People always joke that bands that use electronic drums are cheating, somehow, but it's way harder than playing to live drums. If the monitors are shit at a venue we'll usually drop all electronics from the set, because if we can't hear them we'll go out of time and it will all go to shit. We try to keep someone tweaking the electronics at all times, so we're using the computer as another instrument to play, rather than just 'pressing play'. Unfortunately, sometimes the compositions require us all to be doing other things, so it is just a case of kicking them off and staying in time with them. We're not so stubborn that we'll let the compositions suffer just keep someone twiddling the knobs for it's own sake.
What it was like to share a stage with Don Cab?
Cool. We'd heard some intimidating stories about their drummer, but he was pretty sound. A big geezer, though. You certainly wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of him.
Whats the writing process like for you guys? Will Cook (Editor) wanted to know how you created such intricate and fucking beautfiul music??
It's generally pretty slow. Most songs take about 3 months from inception to final draft, although that's not always the case and we got one (mostly) finished in a couple of days recently.Â On the other hand, we plough through ideas at a pretty high speed, and throw away 75% more stuff than we keep, and some of that 75% is pretty good, but without context good ideas mean nothing. Lee is the most productive of all of us, and sometimes it's necessary for the rest of us to just stand back and try to catch the best of the ideas he's throwing out at 90 riffs per minute. We record all of our rehearsals, then listen back and rinse the good ideas and develop them into full compositions. It's nice when we have a totally improvised jam and something truly beautiful comes out of it, but that doesn't happen that often.
He also wanted to know why you never play in East Anglia and if you say it's because you never get asked he'll definitely book you!
We're playing Cambridge, which is where I grew up, but we're yet to venture further East than that (except when we played Latitude). We have nothing against East Anglia though, it's just nobody's ever asked us to play there before. Make him book us!
Lastly, what do you have in store for your fans and yourselfs in 2009? Besides the tour of course!
We're basically trying to write the follow up to 'White Fields...' as we speak, and hopefully we'll be ready to record it by the end of the year. We're not gonna force it, though, and if it takes longer than that, then so be it. We're gonna put another digital single out later in the spring, which will have some tasty remixes as B-sides, plus a tune from the Pachyderm sessions which didn't make it onto the album.
Check the band out at www.myspace.com/vesselsband